4NORMAL, CONVENIENT, COMFORTABLELexicons of Access in Urban Modernity

How Do You Say “Accessible” in Russian?

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the entrance of transnational actors into the Russian and the Russophone public sphere, the use of translated Anglophone phrases to describe services, goods, and habits have become a common part of daily Russian life. Russians read and write emails on mobil’niki (mobile phones) or noutbuki (notebook computers), aspire to live not in apartments but in kottezhi (cottages or single-family homes), discuss the merits of a particular pi-er (PR or public relations) strategy, meet friends for sushi, and are likely to postavit’ laik (like) a friend's social media post. As in many languages, in some cases, the Russian word for an imported object or novel concept is a simple cognate, adjusted to Russian pronunciation; in other cases, transnational political, social, and manufacturing concepts appear as technical direct translations of a foreign term. For instance, Russian language terms exist for weapons of mass destruction (oruzhie massovogo porazheniia) and domestic violence (domashnee nasilie). While accessible design falls into the latter category—a concept that is discernibly not endemic to Russia and Russian but adapted and mobilized in Russian social and political contexts—the phrase dostupnyi dizain, a direct translation of accessible design, does not circulate as a distinct concept. Instead, the concept of barrier-free environment is more widely used, translated as bezbar’ernaia sreda.

The Russian translation of the word accessible, dostupnyi, does not necessarily index disability access, although it may. While disability advocates and advocacy organizations use this word to describe disability access, its conceptual domain in general discourse is less readily related to disability than its English counterpart. The English language use of access in relation to disability access is a relatively recent development. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED 2014) includes an entry under accessible (adjective) that relates to design and disability, which specifies this usage as originating in the United States, and states, “Capable of being conveniently used or accessed by people with disabilities; of or designating goods, services, or facilities designed to meet the needs of the disabled.” The general definition of accessible is “Capable of being entered or approached; easy of access; readily reached or got hold of,” deriving from the Latin accedere, to approach. The Oxford English Dictionary entry for barrier (noun) does not have specific mention of disability, but it may be an obstruction, material or immaterial, something that stops an advance. In this sense, “barrier-free” and “accessible” function as synonyms in contemporary popular discourse in English, although disability advocates and scholars might distinguish the two in terms of theoretical underpinnings and regional derivations.¹

The middling association between the word dostupnyi, the direct translation of “accessible”, and disability or accessible design, is also evident in the way the word is used in Russophone mass media discourse. A search of the Universal Database of Russian Central Newspapers shows that most uses of the words dostupno and dostupnyi (adverb and adjectival forms of all genders and cases) in print news stories still refer not to disability but rather to the affordability of goods and services or to the capacity of average citizens to obtain said goods or services. It is a common word, with 116,575 entries between 1980 and 2015—including, for example, a sentence in relation to health care for women and children, A glavnoe, chto eto dostupno vsem (The main thing is that it be accessible [available] to everyone). The database searches as far back as 1980, and by date, the majority of instances of words with the root dostup relate to this concept of availability or practical capacity to obtain to a resource. The use of dostupnost’ in relation to disability is much more scarce. In fact, the relationship of the Russian dostupnost’ to space and infrastructure is less central to the usage than the English access. In this way, the concept of access as a subdefinition of the general definition that specifically relates to barriers affecting people with disabilities seems to have a limited circulation in journalistic discourse. That is, most Russian-speakers would understand the concept of dostupnost’ for invalidov not as a conceptual domain in and of itself, but rather as an appropriate extension of the general meaning of the word dostupnost’, although disability advocates would recognize the phrase dostupnaia sreda (accessible built environment).

I heard a similar phrase, bezbar’ernaia sreda (barrier-free environment), from disability advocates in various regions of Russia. It was used by the Moscow-based disability advocacy organization Perspektiva to describe material conditions that facilitate access. Svetlana, my colleague and interlocutor who wrote her dissertation (2009) on the socialization of young adults with disabilities in Karelia, also used this phrase in her academic work. Having heard Svetlana use this term to describe advocacy efforts in Petrozavodsk in September 2012, I subsequently used it in my conversations and interviews with my interlocutors. However, reading my transcribed interviews, I noted that while my interlocutors sometimes used the phrase in direct response to a question that I asked using the phrase, they rarely used it on their own accord.

Reflecting on the register of this translated term, I wondered how legal disability rights advocates in Russia might think of it. In 2014, I wrote to a disability advocate I know, Galina Gorbatykh, who lives in a different region of Russia. Galina received her master's degree in Francophone Canada in the 1990s, and is a lawyer and a local politician (as well as a wheelchair-user). Given this background, I was curious how Galina understood the term bezbar’ernaia sreda as one that had moved into Russian discourse from abroad, as I suspected that the derivation was a technical one related to legal provisions or architectural standards. In response to a short private message that I sent online (in polite but colloquial Russian), Galina sent back a long response, in which she cited numerous laws and provisions in which the phrase had appeared, frequently slipping into the highly technical jargon of official or legal Russian. While she may have copied and pasted some segments of this response from some of the advocacy materials she uses in her work, it is also possible that, given her professional area of expertise, this is simply the register of language in which she describes the question of accessibility.

For instance, she opened her response with a definition of the term as it operates in Russian, and then immediately situated this usage in relation to transnational disability advocacy concerns.

The term dostupnaia or bezbar’ernaia sreda is called up on many legal acts in the Russian Federation and in various sources has different shades of meaning. In most contexts, the term ‘dostupnaia sreda’ can appear in the sense of: a barrier free environment (bezbar’ernaia sreda)—that is, those elements of the surroundings (okruzhaiushchie sredy) through which people can enter and move freely and which people with physical, sensory or intellectual impairments can use.

A setting (sreda) for the activities of daily living, that is accessible (dostupnaia) for the disabled is usually an environment (sreda) that has been renovated (oborudovannaia) with consideration for the needs that arise in connection with disability (invalidnost’iu), and that in using, the disabled may carry out an independent way of life.

Galina confirmed that both the phrases dostupnaia or bezbar’ernaia sreda are primarily used in legal discourse, entering the Russian language through legal doctrine beginning in the 1990s.² In this sense, we can understand the derivation of the terms as located in an official register of speech related to Russian legal doctrine. Galina also specified that the origin of the terms is related to a global context in which accessibility in public space for people with a disability is a concern that circulates transnationally. She wrote:

Creating accessible environments (sozdaniia dostupnoi sredy) for all is also a worldwide problem. Addressing and solving the issue of eliminating barriers begins first of all with architecture. Starting from the end of the 1950s, steps have been taken to create accessible environments for all, beginning with proposals from disabled people's organizations in the countries of Western Europe and North America including practical recommendations for city planners and designers and architects.

Galina's experience studying disability transnationally, and her role as a leading advocate and authority in her region, was clear in her tone and the way that she situated disability access as a shared struggle worldwide. She oriented her understanding of the origin of the concept of accessible built environments to narratives emerging from North America.

Galina's language was pitched toward legal advocacy. It had the forceful tone of someone accustomed to writing to enforce the weight of the law. The terminology of accessibility—that is, the direct translations of the terms access and barrier-free environment that circulate globally—in Russian remain tied to formal registers of language. My interlocutors—in the inaccess stories they shared in interviews and in general conversations—tended to use more colloquial endemic Russophone terms to describe qualities of good passage.

Interlocutor Inaccess Stories: Colloquial Vocabularies and Attributes of Access

Through a colleague at a local university, I was introduced by email to Artyom, a university student with cerebral palsy (CP). We met on an early spring day in 2013 when there was still drifted snow along the sidewalks, the sky a low gray, at a café not far from the city's eternal flame monument. We had a cup of tea and a pastry and talked, and Artyom suggested a walk, moving along the sidewalk using aluminum crutches with plastic arm braces. Later, I returned to this interview when I searched my ethnographic archive for terms that I noticed were often used alongside the word dostupno or dostupnost’ (accessible or access). At one point in my interview with Artyom, he explained that when he is walking in the city or boarding a bus, “I need to consider every act, and consider the possibilities, consider how [I go about things so that it] will be more convenient (udobnee) for me.” He was responding to a question about access in his family's apartment, which he explained was a fifth-floor walk-up. The staircase was particularly difficult during the long process of gaining strength following a procedure that left his leg in a cast. It was in the context of this longer inaccess story that he considered convenience.

After the cast came off, you can imagine, it was difficult. For half a month my legs wouldn’t flex, because they had been in the cast, and then you start to work them … basically, physical therapy, pain, a whole lot of tears, and then it gets better. […] at first you won’t be able to do anything at all, then you’ll have worked out something about your system and you start to walk, and then it starts to come to you more quickly. […] Then you can go downstairs only holding on with one hand, but you can always put down a crutch. Before it was only sideways, holding on with two hands and going pretty slowly. […] Now I can go down either with or without a railing, just with my legs and my crutches. […] Then the next phase is public transit—trolleybus, bus … not many people understand, but for me, I need to consider every act, and consider the possibilities, how will it be more convenient (udobnee) for me. […] Before, in the winter—on crutches and without help—I wasn’t able to go anywhere—it was hard, and if it was slippery it was even scarier […] The past two years I have been getting around normally (normal’no) in the winter, even when it's all snowy I can come and go, wherever I need to.

In this interview segment, Artyom described the progress that he made in terms of a growing ability to move independently through the city as he gained strength and skill walking with a metal crutch following his surgery, a journey that began with small movements in his family apartment, and slowly expanded to include the stairwell, then the street, and finally the city's old, difficult-to-enter-and-exit, and often-bumpy-to-ride buses and trolleybuses. The structure of the built environment, particularly the fact that his family's apartment was on the fifth floor created a disabling structure. Reflecting on his experience working up to riding public transportation on his own (essential for attending university in the city), he described the degree to which a particular manner of doing something (sposob) would be convenient (udobnee) for him. In this construction, convenience approached a semantic conceptual realm similar to that of disability access. Artyom could have used the word dostupnyi (the direct translation of “accessible” but derived from the translation of the transnational concept into Russian) as an adjective to describe a given experience; however, the comparative adjective (dostupnee) is a bit awkward and unwieldy, and he opted for the more colloquial udobnee. Interestingly, sposob shares a root with sposobnost’, a noun meaning ability or capacity, which is frequently used in translations of disability terminology (e.g., a person with limited abilities). But here, the short form remains squarely within Russophone morphology, not straying into formal phrasing that allude to translational concepts; the tone is deeply personal and self-reflexive. Similarly, Artyom used the adjective normal’no, colloquially a turn of phrase like the English “just fine,” to assess his present capabilities in getting around in public space in the winter. Artyom's use of these phrasings were echoed with other interviewees in Petrozavodsk, adults in their twenties and thirties with mobility impairments, who often used both the formal lexicon of disability advocacy and more colloquial terms to describe moving through their daily lives.

Artyom's use of synonyms and attributes to dostupnyi/ee was part of a wider pattern of discursive engagement with the idea of disability access observed across interviews with several interlocutors in Petrozavodsk. In addition to udobno, my interlocutors with mobility impairments used other attributes of access—including normal’no, komfortno, and spokoino—to discuss experiences of (in)access (see table 1 and table 2). Furthermore, in Artyom's use of the comparative adjective, and other interlocutors’ frequent reference to experiences that are more or less accessible, accessibility functioned as a relative concept, established by way of comparison. When asked about their experiences navigating daily life, interlocutors with disabilities made use of this lexicon to draw comparisons between different kinds of experiences and express approval or disapproval for elements of the urban built environment in their city and elsewhere.

One example of this lexicon of access emerged in an interview with Vera, who lived in a first floor apartment, as described in the previous chapter. Vera had used a wheelchair since childhood as a result of a spinal cord injury, and at the time of our interview, was in her thirties. She had two small children, and lived with her parents, husband, and children in the apartment that her parents had obtained, and which she had worked to make accessible. Describing the apartment's accessibility, she commented:

So—it's like halfway passable, we have, I mean at my house there is a separate ramp, and the apartment has been remodeled so that, well, because the hallways were really narrow everywhere, and the doorways were narrow. So, now everything is like, they planned it out so that it's just fine (absoliutno normal’no). I can move without a problem (spokoino) through the doors, I can get out to the street by myself. The thing is that, the problem that most people in a wheelchair have is—umm, that they can’t get out of the house, but, thankfully, I don’t have that [issue].

Normal’no is a highly generalizable word that can be deployed in a wide variety of conversational contexts, either wholeheartedly or sarcastically to mean, “not bad at all” or “the same as usual” (which, given the implication, could mean quite bad indeed). As others have argued, the concept of normal’no or normal living conditions in late-Soviet and post-Soviet life often references a longed-for vision of European modernity, which was understood to be out of reach in socialist eastern Europe and (post-)Soviet Russia (Fehérváry 2013; Zavisca 2012). In this example from Vera's description of her apartment, the term suggests an adequate level of accessible design execution.

Another word used to refer obliquely to access in interviews was komfortno. Similar to udobno in terms of denoting convenience and comfort, the term komfortno is also similar to normal’no in terms of indexing a European middle-class standard of modern urban amenities. For instance, Tania, a woman with dwarfism (or, a little person, as many in anglophone society prefer) in her thirties, used this term when describing how accessible design and attitudes of social inclusion coincided in her experiences visiting neighboring Finland, which she characterized as more accessible and more inclusive of disabled people than Russian Karelia. Sitting together one sunny winter afternoon in a quiet room, the sociable and vibrant Tania pushed her blond-highlighted bangs to the side, her large blue-green eyes flicking from the upholstery pattern on the bed where she sat to me and back again. Unpretentious and earnest, but with a sense of humor, Tania reflected,

I go to Finland often, because it's close, and then also because I have a good friend there. […] Well, almost every year […] I get there somehow or other … […] they have these really little cute houses, there, and I don’t know, green lawns, it's all so nice, right? […] In general it's a totally different feeling. […] And there isn’t litter all over the road. Everything is done so nicely, the asphalt is good quality, smooth (gladkii), when you’re driving in the car. So, it's komfortno there.

In this excerpt from a longer quotation in which Tania described her experiences as a woman with dwarfism in Finland, she collapsed and intentionally drew parallels between ease of movement, the built environment, and social attitudes. While she did not use a mobility device, she did rely on transit to get around, and she appreciated the smoothness of driving in Finland as reflecting an urban modernity that was convenient and inclusive. As I read the interview transcripts, in Tania's description, I found a persistent slippage or metonymic association between the structure and maintenance of the built environment and the experience of moving through public space as someone marked by difference and hindered by access barriers.

In these examples, disabled interlocutors make use of a variety of Russophone terms in conversations about disability access. The attributes of access described by my interlocutors at once echoed Soviet logics of comfort, ease, and convenience and were interlaced with demands for a normal standard of living, that suggest a dissatisfaction with the Russian state. I argue that this dissatisfaction points to the second, metaphorical way, that access moves in friction. I argue that the metonymic association between the design and maintenance of accessible infrastructure and the idea of a normal life or the good life were deeply linked for my interlocutors: practically (in the sense that access really is convenient), rhetorically (because aligning calls for access with popular critiques of the state is strategic), and historically (because Russophone concepts of public infrastructure are deeply inflected with Soviet communist claims about the relationship between the material and the political). It is to this last valence that I now turn for further analysis.

Inconvenience as a Soviet Political Claim

As I considered the taxonomy of attributes of dostupnost’, however, I began to suspect that the attributes that adhere to these near-synonyms of access in English and dostupnost’ in Russian might diverge. That is, the historical lexicon of terms related to disabling barriers in the built environment evidently developed somewhat separately, and therefore the overlapping semantic domains of the various terms would not match up across the two languages over time. In order to think through this relationship, I conducted a brief etymological survey of Russian dictionaries and English-Russian and Russian-English dictionaries published over the course of the twentieth century.³

I found that in Russian usage in the mid-20^th century, the anglophone perception that convenience is somehow apolitical was in fact inverted in the post-Soviet Russian usage of udobnost’ and its various forms. In Russian etymology, the term udobstvo is particularly connected to concepts of desirable living spaces with modern accommodations. In Soviet terms, this often meant public heating, hot water, indoor plumbing and toilets, a slew of services that at mid-twentieth century and onward was referred to as blagoustroistvo, literally, well-appointed constructions, colloquially, modern domestic quarters. These are spaces that are equipped for the necessities of the everyday (byt). Meanwhile, this connotation of public infrastructure was, for most of the Soviet period in the dictionaries I consulted, absent from definitions or cross-definitions of the word dostupnost’ (access). That is, the attribute of referencing the politics of infrastructure in the built environment appeared in usage as closer to udobstvo (convenience), as compared with dostupnost’ (access).

While it seems an anglophone perspective that access is invariably a more political concept than convenience, a historical consideration of the Russophone concepts of udobstvo and dostupnost’ suggests that perhaps the opposite may be true in the post-Soviet context. If so, we may find that inconvenience is the politically coded complaint that mobilizes the second type of inaccess stories that circulate in Russian public discourse independent of lived experience of disability. To examine this possibility, it is necessary to explore further how convenience appears in Russophone political complaint.

Citizen complaint as a genre of political speech is a topic of substantial scholarly attention in Russian area studies. In her ethnographic account of what she calls the “unravelling” of professional journalism in Russia in the 1990s and early 2000s, Natalia Roudakova (2017) studied how working journalists conducted and understood their work in the newsrooms of regional Russian newspapers. She demonstrates that their sense of duty to offer voice to public sentiment was rooted in a Soviet journalistic ethos that also sought to represent a vox populi—so much as was possible in an era of pervasive censorship, and then through the opening of glasnost’. In her chapter on the ethics and politics of Soviet journalism, Roudakova devotes substantial attention to the genre of the letter to the editor. She argues that in spite of the pervasive censorship that made direct consideration of certain topics impossible, an ethic (in the sense of unfolding practices) of truth-telling and truth-seeking guided journalistic practice in the late-Soviet period. Moreover, Roudakova argues that in the beginning of the Soviet era, Bolsheviks placed an important emphasis on soliciting citizen complaints, grievances, and suggestions, as “popular control from below.” This drew on the practice of complaint that peasants brought to regional authorities in imperial times (Muravyeva 2014). In spite of pervasive perceptions in the West that Soviet citizens had little capacity to affect social change and make political claims on the state, scholars of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia tell a different story. For instance, historian Sheila Fitzpatrick argues that complaints about misuse of funds, abuse of power, and so on were widespread throughout the Stalinist period (2000, 28–29). Moreover, the Soviet press played an important official role in whistle-blowing at the regional level, Roudakova argues, and Soviet journalists had a duty and obligation to participate in governing by airing complaints that served as surveillance from below (2017, 30). She asserts that while much of the Soviet press was indeed devoid of the capacity to speak truth to power, “in the back pages of newspapers, particularly in ocherki (long form commentary essays), as well as in reviews of readers’ letters, the courage of the writer pushing the limits of the sayable could come across” (2017, 48).

In this light, my journalist friend's video exposé on the lack of access at the purportedly accessible regional theater building (described in chapter 2) looks less like pandering to “global” globalniye—a gentle way of saying “innostrannye” or foreign—interests by invoking terminology of disability access, and more like a genre of reportage that takes seriously a duty to air the pervasive issue of Potemkin villages, false facades, and unfulfilled promises. Roudakova gives numerous examples of these genres in the late-Soviet period and the truth-seeking effect they held.

In our own study of major Soviet newspapers Izvestiia and Pravda digitized archives (1945–1989), Gyuzel Kamalova and I found numerous examples of oblique references to physical disability in relation to the design, construction, or maintenance of infrastructure and the built environment (Novopolianskii 1975, 1977). From assertions that veterans needed adapted showers in the public baths in Saint Petersburg, to calls for war-wounded veterans to be first in line to receive newly built apartments with proper modern conveniences, commentary typically used the politically speakable category of war veteran or elderly to address these considerations (in our assessment, there was almost no mention of physical disability outside of the paradigm of war injury, for young people and almost no mention of disabled children in spite of pension changes in the wake of the polio epidemic, which also went unmentioned). In one example, a veteran wondered why he was allotted housing on a hill, as it was inconvenient for someone like him with difficulty walking to get to a bus stop. In the examples we reviewed, convenience was connected to the question of building socialism, either implicitly or explicitly. This emerged in two ways: First, the idea that because bytie opredelaet soznanie (or being) determines consciousness, insufficient infrastructure is emblematic of a society that does not strive to improve or build a political consciousness that allows citizens to imagine a better future. Second, it reflects the notion that a public complaint about inconvenience is a kind of duty that should be aired. Therefore, in this example, claims about disability access constitute claims about a state's failure to produce minimum standards of infrastructure for normal life, convenience, and thereby the establishment of an imagined political sphere of society that draws on these long-standing ethical norms.

Therefore, the concept of udobstvo is significantly related to the anglophone concept of accessible design as a domain of political complaint, although the direct translation of access would be dostupnost’. There are a few specific concerns with the suggestion that the Russian words dostopnost’ (accessibly) and udobno (conveniently) might be understood as semantically overlapping. On the surface, in English, although the practical usage of convenient and accessible overlap, only accessible has been designated as the term that applies to political advocacy concerning the attributes of the built environment to prevent or enable the social and political participation of disabled people. Moreover, in English, the word convenience tends toward the trivial or inconsequential. When we speak of convenience in North American English, we refer to quotidian concerns: errands, whether to get out of the car at the bank or use a drive-through ATM machine; whether to take another route on a commute that requires fewer transfers or turns but takes five minutes longer; if a movie theater has long wait times or not; if excess energy will be expended on hassle, bureaucracy, distance, or waiting. Indeed, the definition of convenient in English includes the idiomatic usage “convenient to” meaning close to, or within easy distance of. This suggests a possible affinity between convenience and the notion of crip time. We often ask, “whose access is prioritized?” in English when we are considering design bias for nondisabled users. But, we might also ask, “whose convenience is prioritized?” a question that also gets at assumptions of privilege. In short, while access makes something possible that would not otherwise be possible for a disabled person, convenience makes something a little bit easier⁴; therefore, in English, convenience is not related to ableism, while access describes a politics of rectifying ableist structures.

If, and this is the main problem, we contrast access with convenience in English, it presents a possible—and possibly troubling—slippage for disability advocacy. Because access is the term mobilized in the service of disability rights as a political movement, to suggest that it is similar to convenience undermines the agentive political will that access (in the context of inclusive design) suggests. That is, where access suggests attending to those needs that are required for participation, convenience suggests (perhaps extraneous) labor performed to prioritize the time, ease, and comfort of others. Indeed, when accessibility accommodations are misread as requests for convenience, they are often maligned. Furthermore, convenience in English tends to suggest an experience of something already laid out, a passive appreciation, whereas access tends to carry a connotation of equity, advocacy, and active agitation.⁵ Where convenience is received and appreciated, access is fought for and won. As Lauren Berlant (2022) observes, in North America, we associate inconvenience with ways in which other people impinge on our agentive sovereignty or freedom. This gets at another problem with the concept of convenience: convenience for whom? Providing access for others has been persistently represented as an inconvenience to nondisabled others, for business owners, and so on; in this way, in/convenience as a term has implicit associations with ableist resistance to disability access and inclusion movements. In English, then, to speak about in/convenience does not approach the political potency of claims about in/access. I argue that the reverse is true in Russian: although dostupnost’ remains the formal term for legal codes referring to accessible design, complaints about inaccess are most potently formulated as complaints about inconvenience. In this way, inaccess stories might even be rightly called inconvenience stories in Russian, as udobstvo better indexes political complaint about the built environment in colloquial speech than dostupnost’.

Pothole Talk: Infrastructures and the Politics of In/convenience

In conversations about infrastructural barriers among the nondisabled population of the city, one element seemed to attract the most attention: potholes. In the first few months of my fieldwork researching disability and social exclusion in Petrozavodsk, Russia, I noticed that I could not escape them. If I was not stepping around them as I hurried across a street, or being jostled over them in a taxi or marshrutka, friends, acquaintances, and taxi drivers were talking about them. Like the weather, potholes were the favored conversation for small talk and idle conversation. Potholes were a part of the shared conditions of life to which chitchat might always turn, either in moments of forging passing solidarity with strangers, or bemoaning the status quo between gossip and catching up with friends or colleagues. Like Tania's comment that the roads in Finland were so smooth, suggesting that the roads in Russia were not, talk about potholes and bad roads in Petrozavodsk indexed an imagined elsewhere, where the government demonstrated that it cared for its citizens by caring for the roads.

People remarked on and complained about potholes. Taxi drivers, noticing my accent, made wry jokes and apologies about the “state of our roads.” Friends updated one another about what they had heard about the schedule of public works projects: this fall they will repave Nevskii, next spring they are scheduled to do Kirovskii. By the time the spring rolled around, I found that I was the one cracking pothole jokes to cab drivers, who would guffaw and turn to look at me with raised eyebrows, clocking the unusual combination of my foreign accent and local style of banter.

One summer afternoon in 2012, not long after arriving in the field but long before I had become fluent in pothole chitchat, I was cutting through a courtyard on my way to a neighborhood grocery. The courtyard was dusty and dirty, with large, shallow, dried-up “lakes”—less pothole than wide craters. Another time, when my friend Masha and I passed through the same courtyard on the way to walk along the embankment of Lake Onego, the large, forest-lined lake that defines the city's perch in the Karelian wilderness, we joked, “Oh, here we are—Lake Onego!” “It's so much smaller than I pictured it.” “I didn’t realize it was so close to my house!”

But that afternoon on the way to the grocery store, I paused, noticing a decal sticker on the rear window of a nearby Lada: Kakaia Vlast’, Takie i Dorogi.

Like many short phrases, its meaning was clear, but it resisted adequate translation. As I continued my walk, I filtered through possible renditions of the phrase in English:

1. Such power, and such roads

2. Such is the government, such are the roads

3. What a government, and what roads

The word vlast’ in Russian references both the sovereign power of a ruler or a system of government. It indicates a power that emanates from the center in a political science sense, or in common usage, regime or, simply, “the government.” In the plural, vlasti could mean, “the ones in power” or “the authorities.” This usage was complicated by the grammatical structure of the comparative clause “kakaia … takie,” which does not have a clear counterpart in English, making translations inevitably awkward.

1. “However the _________, so is the ____________”

2. “What _________, and what ____________”

3. “As is the _________, so goes the ____________”

4. “Such _________, and such ____________”

Significantly, the phrase leaves the judgment about what the state of the roads are to the reader, interpellating the reader of the sticker into a shared complaint, a conspiratorial affinity. To any Russian reading the bumper sticker, the implication is clear: Bad roads, bad government. As the days went on, I noticed, the bumper sticker affixed to cars around the city and found numerous examples in online photos.

When people in Petrozavodsk talk about potholes, they frequently used the word iama, meaning hole, pit, or wallow. There is not a word like the English pothole, a noun dedicated to the particularity of holes in the road needing repair. Aside from iama, a pothole might be described in Russian as rytvina (rut, groove, gulch) or vyboina (dent, corrugation, or the pot-shaped forms in river rocks, usually called potholes in English). This array of Russian synonyms belies a condition of permanency that is quite different from the American understanding of the word “pothole,” which implies a temporary problem that by definition needs to be fixed. In Petrozavodsk, when people talk about iamy, they are talking about of the municipal lack of attention to roads. They are describing a situation in which nothing could go smoothly, both literally and metaphorically.

Pothole talk is a discursive register reserved for sharing woes, principally, complaints that may not have an answerable response. These are complaints that are posed as a manner of gesturing to a gap between a lived reality and an imagined good life (Chua 2014). In writing about Russia, many scholars have described a “culture of complaint,” observing that “complaining is a popular form of communication in present-day Russian society” (Muravyeva 2014, 93–94). In many cases, scholarly discussion of a Russian culture of complaint refers to an array of habits of written complaint that address the inadequacies of the state to representatives of the state (Muravyeva 2014, 94). But in thinking about pothole talk, I am interested in performative complaint, voiced grievances, the purpose of which is not always a resulting change but rather a bond of commiseration. Specifically, this is not a complaint to authorities, but rather, a voicing of dissatisfaction to another citizen (Ries 1997).

While the genres of complaint that Ries documents, and that I observe, seem to offer no solution per se, they may also do important work of creating openings for other possibilities. Scholars have argued that complaint, including Russian patterns of complaint, say as much about a desired “ideal state” that is implicitly referenced, as a contrast to the undesirable circumstances described, as they do about the current state of affairs (Muravyeva 2014, 99). In my interlocutors’ complaints, the imagined ideal state is often sketched as already in existence somewhere. That is, complaints are grounded in a diffuse sense that things are different elsewhere, abroad. Descriptions of Russian infrastructural inadequacy—ramps, potholes, or otherwise—are posited in relation to some imaginary West. The bumper sticker suggests that somewhere, because the government is good, so, too, are the roads.

The recitation of litanies and the telling of absurdist tales and ironic jokes is part of a cultural ritual of social communion. People gather around kitchen tables, in taxi cabs, in cafes or over cups of tea at the breakroom table, and share these stories. Through these enacted rituals of complaint, Ries argues, her interlocutor “identified herself with the moral community created through shared suffering and difficulty, thus effacing the boundaries between her social group and the Russian people as a whole” (1997, 91). To talk about potholes is to build affinity through shared circumstance. Ries argues that these modes of Russian talk (she is talking about the Perestroika era, but I find her definition of the genre helpful, even though a great deal of time has passed) offer not only the constitutive meaning of articulating claims about what is not right, or what has not been properly executed by those in power (e.g., the bumper sticker is a mode of activism in its own right) but also serves the function of bringing people together in moral objection to the status quo. Ries suggests that litany and Russian tales serve to create a “generalized social bond” (1997, 87).

In fact, in Petrozavodsk, complaints about iami or potholes were made with no intention of pursuing an “official” resolution to the problem. Rather, the complaints function to build camaraderie, establishing a “we” who suffers, while “they” (vlasti - the ones in power) do nothing. Ries suggests that suffering and tales that recount instances of suffering have special meaning in Russian discourse. She argues that talk about difficult social circumstances, of getting through a difficulty, had to do with “belonging in some kind of moral community—a community that shared suffering. As ritual recitations, litanies invoked and created access to that belonging” (Ries 1997, 87). In an ethnographic account of neoliberal post-Soviet Russian treatments for alcohol, Eugene Raikhel documents a similar pattern by which clinicians make claims about the “double morality” of a post-Soviet situation in which citizens are expected to be upstanding and engage in self-managing practices even while the state “took everything away and didn’t return anything” (2016, 52–53). Raikhel notes that the tendency of interlocutors to offer “sweeping accounts of the Soviet past” may be influenced by an awareness of the ethnographer's foreignness, but observes that they are also undergirded by a real “longing for social norms and institutional structures” (2016, 53). Rituals of complaint enacted in a wide variety of cultures might also work to enhance social bonds by interpellating the speaker and listener into shared community. Inaccess stories, as a kind of litany, might be thought of as a discursive mode of establishing the moral personhood of a speaker.

Describing Metonyms of an Imagined Otherwise

Accessible infrastructure is not just the implementation of a particular technology. Rather, as we have seen in previous chapters, it is a complex network of heterogeneous actors who must come together to facilitate what Moser and Law call “good passages,” moments when components and networks fit, and movement through space works. As Moser and Law write, addressing a disability studies audience, “to repeat the standard lesson from STS: if the networks are in place, if the prostheses are working, then there is ability. If they are not, well then, as is obvious, there is dis/ability. […] Dis/ability is about specific passages between equally specific arrays of heterogeneous materials” (1999, 201). Interrogating colloquial language in my interview transcripts, I found that interlocutors spoke about good passages as peaceful, unhindered, comfortable, and, normal. Good passages are convenient, but not just convenient. Returning to the attributes of access in inaccess stories told by my interlocutors and in pothole talk alike, good passages might also be spokoino (peaceful), normal’no (normal), and comfortable (komfortno). The same descriptors, cast more broadly, might also describe an imagined good life.⁶

The consideration of good passage as a way of thinking about mobility, infrastructure, and movement through space further reinforces the relationship between potholes on the road and poorly constructed ramps (as discussed in previous chapters) as two material expressions of corruption or a failure of the state to care for citizens. Although I included the word spokoino, or peaceful, in the taxonomy of attributes at the beginning of the chapter, I left it unexamined. I turn to it now to consider it in relation to both disability access and roads. Spokoino is a common Russian word, and one that is not designated as referring specifically or officially to disability. It was often used not only by people with disabilities but by other residents of Petrozavodsk to refer to experiences in Finland in which a commonplace experience, such as taking the bus, walking on the sidewalk, or driving over the roads, went unexpectedly smoothly. Spokoino, often translated as calm or peaceful, can also mean placid or tranquil, as a calm body of water, smooth and uninterrupted. Interestingly, a definitive and ethnographically sourced dictionary of Russian from the late 1800s, the entry for spokoi (the shortest form of the word) defines the meaning in part as “absence of disturbance, worries; convenience of life, abundance and care [in the sense of maintenance], services” (Dal’ [1880–1882] 2003, 294).⁷ The entry for the adjectival form, spokoinyi, includes the synonyms udobnyi, lovkii, easy, nimble or efficient, and an example: “A peaceful road, even, level or flat; a peaceful carriage [here he uses the word koliaska, which in current usage means wheelchair or baby carriage, though in Dal's definition, it means, simply, something that rolls], free of jumps and jolts. A peaceful place, comfortable” (Dal’ [1880–1882] 2003, 294).⁸

In this sense, the constellation of meanings—in which the word spokoi refers to comfortable, peaceful, and unbothersome surroundings, especially built environments and infrastructures—has existed at least since Dal's time, the second half of the nineteenth century. This association between access in its current incarnation and a more general sense of freedom from disturbance while moving through space, or across infrastructure, invokes an idiomatic gripe—Russia has two problems: idiots and roads.⁹ In the Russian imaginary stretching back to the 1800s then, roads are perceived as a problem. Whole swaths of text in Gogol's Dead Souls are devoted to descriptions of traveling over muddy, rutted roads in horse-drawn carriages. In this way, even reflected in a presidential comment, maligning Russia's roads is both a national pastime, and somehow linked to some amorphous concept of prototypical, essential Russianness. As an anthropologist, I am not suggesting some definable quality of “essential Russianness” with this phrase, but rather that in popular imagination or everyday discourse, discussion of potholes and poorly cared-for roads indexes a deeply rooted shared mythology about the governance of the Russian nation and the national territory.

I note an important temporal dimension to these moral complaints about bad infrastructure and failed design. The consideration of roads and other forms of infrastructure as peaceful to travel on overlaps conceptually with the question of convenience: Good passage is considerate of the traveler's time. A road rife with potholes delays the traveler. The state's responsibility for temporal inconveniences endured by citizens has particular meaning in the post-Soviet context, in the sense that a feature of state socialist autocracy in living memory for interlocutors was a disregard for the time that citizens spent waiting in line. Verdery (1996) argues that the temporal demands that the Soviet-era socialist state placed on Romanian citizens to receive essential goods and services amounted to a kind of political control, a temporal experience of socialist autocracy defined by queueing. In this way, to point out being made to wait, or being placed on a list (for which there is no reaching the top), or to be delayed in travel because of faulty infrastructure, or to be coerced into a public service interaction that takes longer than necessary, is a kind of complaint about the state of the state. Thus, we might consider a special genre of inaccess stories to be those about temporal failures of accessible infrastructure, the hindering of good passage that is inconvenient because it causes the protagonist to lose time. The temporal inconvenience of interdependent access is one valence of what disability studies scholars call crip time (Samuels 2017; Kafer 2013; McRuer 2018; Hickman 2014).

Anya, the psychologist and powerchair user, told me an inaccess story about crip time that worked to both describe disabled people's frustration and ingenuity in the face of paternalistic systems and to voice a complaint about the moral ineptitude of a government that created a system that did not work. This was a secondhand inaccess story, related to Anya by a friend who lived in Saint Petersburg with whom she communicated with online. The friend sometimes used a paratransit service available to disabled people in Saint Petersburg known as a Sots-Taxi (social service taxi). Although complaints about paratransit were common everywhere, in this case, Anya's friend's complaint was rooted in a paternalist slant of the Sots-Taxi service policy: It was only available to take people to and from social service appointments. Although buses and trams with fold-down ramps began appearing in Saint Petersburg in the 2010s, a large portion of the transit system included the metro (accessible only by long, steep escalators that could not accommodate wheelchairs) and taxi-buses, known as marshrutki, which required the passengers to climb and squeeze into twelve-passenger vans. Anya explained that friend used the Sots-Taxi service all the time, but had to be clever to come up with destinations. On the occasion in question, Anya's friend wanted to go from her home to the theatre.

So where she lived wasn’t far from a medical clinic on one side, and not too far from a cemetery on the other side. So in order to get to the theater, she had to go from the clinic to some kind of social service destination. So my friend says to me, “Today I took a really fantastic trip to the theater … This was my route: clinic, graveyard, theater, and then on the way back, graveyard, clinic … [laughs] Not bad! (Normal’no!)” … But why can’t she order a taxi to go straight from her house to the theater? [imitating her friend] “Why would I need to go through the graveyard to get to the theater? Are you telling me that this is normal (normal’no)?!” So I ask my friend, “Well, so how was it?” And she goes, “Ohh, not bad (normal’no).”

Anya's friend observed that while the state understood essential transportation for disabled people to be only that transportation related to medical and social service appointments, in fact, activities like attending the theater were also essential for human well-being. As such, she felt no guilt in manipulating the system to her own advantage to get where she wanted to go using one of the few accessible options available, even if it was not exactly “normal” in terms of the roundabout route. In this way, Anya's story was both an inaccess story rooted in disability expertise, which built affinity through the description of shared disability culture (crip time unfolding through the travails of public transportation), and a commentary about the state of public infrastructure in Saint Petersburg. Asking, “Are you telling me that this is normal?!” Anya's description of her friend's absurdist bus ride posited the actual normal conditions of travel or good passage as being out of reach. The phrase normal’no in this story was used both to describe the “not bad” valence of a way to move through the world that worked (sort of) and to contrast lived experience of navigating public services and access infrastructure in Russia with an imagined otherwise-elsewhere where wheelchair users were afforded the same freedom of movement as other public transit users.

The built environment both produces and reproduces social relations, and social relations in turn produce the built environment. The dialectical relationship between social relations and the built environment has been thoroughly discussed in Western critical theory (e.g., Lefebvre 2005) and was at the core of the Soviet constructivist enterprise. By building the right physical environment, Soviet planners, architects, and designers surmised that they might in turn produce social relations and subjectivities more conducive to socialism. Soviet infrastructure was thus built with a centrally planned logic intended to benefit the collective over the individual, to maximize the productive capacity of workers, and to facilitate communalism and interdependencies that were imagined as conducive to building a socialist consciousness (Collier 2011). In the context of postsocialist politics of everyday Marxism, ethnographers observe that interlocutors regard the phrase bytie opredelaet soznanie (being determines consciousness) as a truism, that is, the notion that the material world creates the conditions that develop political subjectivity is an obvious statement (Murawski 2022). It follows from everyday Marxism that if the proletariat lives in squalor and is constantly surround by uncultured material surrounds (the infrastructural base), the socialist political consciousness will not develop. And furthermore, it is obvious that it is the responsibility of the state to produce the material infrastructure that might foster socialist consciousness. Resisting the possibility of a functioning infrastructure, and instead observing infrastructure as always produced in terms of special interests or government whim, was also a way of rejecting empty promises in narratives of democratization and development. By describing a state of Russian exceptionalism, in which roads are always worse on the Russian side of the Finnish border (they are), and ramps are always empty symbols (they sometimes are), interlocuters like Tania and Anya also align themselves with a moral universe in which development and good passage come at the expense of other kinds of sacrifice. Talk that reproduces Russia as a territory of inaccess is talk that reproduces Russianness as outside of a Western telos of modernist development. In this way, the metonymic relation between the constitutive meaning of the design of the material world and the semiotic meaning of the design are mobilized in pothole talk and inaccess stories to point to failures of the Russian state to meet the social contract by fulfilling the needs of citizens according to a “normal” standard of life, or an imagined good life.

Vernacular Styles of Complaint

Artyom, describing the experience of leaving his house and taking public transportation while regaining mobility after a surgery, emphasized that his experience was shaped by the need to consider in advance what would be most convenient for him. Like theorists of access in the North/West, with this turn of phrase, Artyom emphasized the ways in which nondisabled people are unaware of the burden that inaccessible infrastructure places on those with mobility impairments, and the expertise, time, and effort that disabled people expend when moving through public space designed without their bodies in mind. Yet, by emphasizing convenience as the valence of experience, Artyom situated his description in relation to colloquial Russophone conventions rooted in styles of complaint about infrastructural failure and the responsibility of the state to care for citizens—styles that have no direct parallel in anglophone lexicons of access.

When Tania described the smooth, litter-free roadways across the international border in nearby Finland, she drew a comparison to the state of roadways in Petrozavodsk. Her commentary follows a long history of complaints about Russian roadways that are imbricated with Western European assessments of Russian infrastructure as backward and insufficiently modern. Her description of little houses with green grass lawns—available just across the border, but seemingly not in Russian Karelia—mobilized signifiers of middle-class Euoramerican modernity, as if to say that accessible infrastructure belonged to a geopolitical formation that existed elsewhere, just not here. The imagined good life indexed by Tania in this comment cataloged accessible infrastructure not as a luxury but as a quotidian necessity. In her description, the public roadways and private infrastructures that facilitated good passage were like the Western domestic consumer goods that Fehérváry's interlocutors coveted: they are at once symbols and functional objects.

Cripping vocabularies of access through the attention to global access friction in the Russian context suggest possible new directions for disability studies discussions about access. The Russian emic concept of barriers and infrastructure always already indexes a relationship to power—or that which configures infrastructure. We see that the performative power of inaccess stories and litanies of complaint that do not offer possible solutions (and in fact elaborate a lack of faith in government) can serve to build social affinity. Additionally, I suggest that the de facto location of US discursive practice as the normative model for activism and social change may lead global advocates to miss subtle modes of allegiance building and imaginaries of other possible worlds. When disability studies asks, “for whom does infrastructure work?” relations of power are always invoked. Cultural training may predispose Western theorists, however, to think of the systems of oppression structuring the “for whom” as always related to minority identities. In contrast, the Russian word vlast’ appears in moments when speakers seek to emphasize the moral corruption of pursuing financial gain for its own sake, or power for its own sake (Ries 1997). Infrastructure works for those in power, an insight that might be useful for Western disability advocates to explore further at home.

Lexicons for and about disability and access lend another tool to area studies research on political subjectivities of postsocialism. There may be more nuance to endemic vocabularies of disability access than the global rhetoric—that moves in friction—suggests. In this way, convenience, as a paradigm, udobstvo, might be considered a more political concept than access in Russophone discourse. In making this argument, I am follow others (Phillips 2011; Shaw 2017; Galmarini 2016) in suggesting that the theoretical and topical lens of disability studies offers another entry point to considering postsocialist political subjectivity. Thinking with the Soviet politics of convenience in relation to the built environment suggests that claims about inaccessible infrastructure in the built environment in Russia in the 2010s—while ostensibly an imported foreign discourse—adhere to an endogenous discourse not only about what the state owes to citizens but also about the significance of infrastructure as an indicator of a healthy society (zdorovoe obshchestvo) and the promise of a political imaginary of a livable future.